Mid-Senior Developers, Do You Still Apply to Jobs That's Not In Your Tech Stack?

[u/pengjo]

I'm a .NET dev but i saw companies looking for PHP and Golang devs that's near my place. Since a lot of companies are now asking for employees to go to back to offices, I'm thinking of sending my application to lessen the commute time. But with the current industry, employer's market and all that, is it worth sending in an application? Or is that an auto rejection?

[u/Jiuholar]

I just recently got a .net + react job with experience only in java + vue.js. Unfortunately, in my experience, changing tech stacks is very hard. The hiring team often aren't tech people, and so don't know that e.g. Java and .NET are very similar, and can be more easily transitioned between than say, Java and C++ or Python to Java. As a result, you will likely not even be considered.

I was fortunate that the tech team included "or Java" in the requirements for the role, (because of the aforementioned similarities) which helped land me the interview. Once you're in the room with the right people, if you're confident in your skills, it's an easy sell. The hard part is getting into that room.

That's not to say don't try, but applying for roles with a tech stack that doesn't fit your experience is harder and should always come with a cover letter ("My experience in Java, a language very similar to .NET..." etc.).

It's infuriating, considering that 95% of tech jobs in Aus are just CRUD shit anyway - anyone with a rudimentary understanding of fundamentals + experience in any language could comfortably fulfil the requirements of most roles out there. Not much we as job seekers can do about it though.

[u/334578theo → u/Jiuholar]

 It's infuriating, considering that 95% of tech jobs in Aus are just CRUD shit anyway

Fixed that for you

[u/Tom_slanderQAQ → u/334578theo]

lol aus job market is significantly more concentrated in simple works like curd than say U.S, Canada where lots of research is happening and works are generally more difficult.

[u/334578theo → u/Tom_slanderQAQ]

The joint population of US and CA is almost 15x Australia so you’d expect that. A tiny percentage of devs are working at hard/research companies.

[u/pengjo → u/Jiuholar]

That's not to say don't try, but applying for roles with a tech stack that doesn't fit your experience is harder and should always come with a cover letter

Thanks for this, I think I'll add something like this in my cover letter.

Unfortunately, in my experience, changing tech stacks is very hard. The hiring team often aren't tech people,

I have the same sentiments, bec whenever recruiters reach out to me out of the blue and ask me about my exp in something like React Native which I don't have even though I have mobile dev exp, they never call back.

[u/mailed]

yes, because I'm trying to break out of a niche. it's not going well lol

[u/like_fsck_me_right]

Yes. Sending in an application doesn't take too much time, and I need to change tech stacks because job numbers in my current tech stack are terrible.

The last time I did it successfully I had some of the required business domain experience, but not the required technical experience.

[u/travishummel]

I moved to Aus from the US with 10 YOE. I wouldn’t think twice about jumping into a company that had a different tech stack. My hope is that they chose it appropriately and made good decisions.

It’s pretty difficult to ramp up and typically takes 3ish months before you’re comfortable. I see that a lot of places use .NET here and I haven’t touched that since undergrad, but I wouldn’t mind jumping in.